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DANCE; A Traditionalist Who Seeks To Update the Russian Soul

ROMANTICISM lives on in the highly charged work of the Russian choreographer Boris Eifman, a well-known figure in Europe whose Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg only now makes its American debut, beginning Wednesday at City Center. On the bill are two evening-length works by Mr. Eifman that explore themes of forbidden love, alienation, sexual passion, insanity and death. Both works, ''Red Giselle'' and ''Tchaikovsky: The Mystery of Life and Death,'' were inspired by the lives of famous Russian artists, the first a dancer, the second the composer of some of the world's most glorious ballet music.

Though his work is firmly based in classical ballet technique, Mr. Eifman is also Russia's most successful contemporary choreographer. His approach is quintessentially Russian in its emphasis on emotion and in its use of a narrative frame capable of addressing philosophical and political issues. Given that America's modernist school tends to emphasize formal innovations, Mr. Eifman's stance may be hard for some observers to take. There is no reason to suppose, however, that the future of dance, either in Russia or elsewhere, depends on an adoption of American ideas and methods. American dance has no Manifest Destiny.

''Spiritually, my art is very closely related to Russia, and to St. Petersburg in particular,'' Mr. Eifman said during an interview last fall at a midtown Manhattan hotel. Mr. Eifman aims to give that often-cited if indefinable element, Russian soul, a contemporary shape. His work, he said, is meant ''to shake the audience emotionally, to enter deeply into their hearts and minds.''

''The information goes through the heart, then to the head,'' he said.

Mr. Eifman, 52, was born in Siberia and trained as a dancer in Kishinev, Moldavia, and at the Leningrad Conservatory. He began choreographing as a teen-ager; by his second year in the conservatory, he was making ballets for Russian television. Local critics first noticed Mr. Eifman in 1970, when he created a piece called ''Icarus.'' His big break came in 1976, when Lenkonsert, a state-run concert organization, gave him permission to form his own troupe.

Addressing young audiences, and using the music of rock-and-roll artists like Pink Floyd, Mr. Eifman soon found himself touring the Soviet Union and playing to houses filled with thousands of screaming fans. He never received a Government subsidy, he said, and his company supported itself with ticket sales. ''In my company, Perestroika started 10 years early,'' he said.

He remains a devoted populist. With his company now free to tour the world, he said, ''the most important thing is that this art be understandable to everyone.''

Mr. Eifman's ballet ''Red Giselle'' pays tribute to the ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, who died at an advanced age in 1991. Best known in the West for her interpretation of classics like ''Giselle,'' ''Swan Lake'' and ''The Sleeping Beauty,'' Spessivtseva took on the role of Princess Aurora in Serge Diaghilev's seminal 1921 production of ''Beauty'' (which he rechristened ''The Sleeping Princess''). According to the ballerina Alexandra Danilova, who died last year, Spessivtseva introduced one of her specialties, the ''pas de poisson,'' into the ballet's Grand Pas de Deux, and this acrobatic leap remains a standard feature in most Western stagings of the ballet.

The choreographer is less concerned with Spessivtseva's formidable technique, however, than with her unhappy fate. After defecting from Russia to the West, a mental breakdown led to her early retirement from the stage and eventually to an asylum. Spessivtseva's mad scene in ''Giselle'' (a portion of which can be seen in the 1982 television documentary ''A Portrait of Giselle'') eerily presaged the ballerina's future.

To Mr. Eifman, Spessivtseva's madness symbolized her struggle as an artist and as a human being. Reared in the hothouse atmosphere of the Maryinsky Theater, where she trained as a classical virtuoso and performed in ballets intended for the Imperial stage, her world was shattered by Russia's bloody Communist uprising. ''I think the horror that she saw at that time was always with her,'' Mr. Eifman said. Rumors associated Spessivtseva with shadowy figures in the new hierarchy, and a K.G.B. lover supposedly helped her flee the country.

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Yet this was only the beginning of her troubles. Events beyond her control had robbed her of a secure life and exposed her to the uncertain existence of an itinerant dancer in the West. ''Unfortunately, she wasn't able to realize her talents fully in that world,'' said Mr. Eifman, who sees her madness not only as an illness but also as a facet of her talent, an ''ability to be drawn into a different world where normal people cannot penetrate, a world full of imagination.''

IN the ballet ''Tchaikovsky,'' a meditation on the life of Russia's most beloved composer, the emotional swell remains high. ''I listened to his music a hundred times and tried to feel his spirit and understand his emotional life,'' said Mr. Eifman. He hoped to penetrate the composer's inner world, he said, and find the secret of Tchaikovsky's personal tragedy. ''He knew that he had been chosen by God to create this great music,'' said Mr. Eifman. ''But on the other hand he wanted to be an ordinary man.''

In the fantasy world of his music, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky suggested both extraordinary refinement and extreme pathos, sounding notes of triumph and cavernous despair. A homosexual, and an exceptionally sensitive man, Tchaikovsky was nearly rent in two by the conflict between his desires and the imperative to conform. Indeed, Tchaikovsky appears literally divided in Mr. Eifman's work, where he is accompanied by a doppelganger as well as by a clinging wife who cannot comprehend his emotional agony. The pressure of living in a homophobic society where ''don't ask, don't tell'' was the modus operandi leads to the composer's death, at the age of 53.

Mr. Eifman has set his choreography to a compilation of Tchaikovsky's music, including the Serenade for Strings and Symphony No. 5, which balletomanes will recognize as the accompaniment to earlier ballets by George Balanchine and Leonide Massine.

As a creator of dramatic dance, Mr. Eifman has had countless predecessors in his native land, beginning with Ivan Liesogorov and continuing through Lev Ivanov, Mikhail Fokine, Aleksandr Gorsky and onward to Leonid Lavrovsky, Leonid Yakobson and Yuri Grigorovich. All of these choreographers, despite their individualities, shared a belief in the potential of dance as an expressive, narrative form.

A fashionable but simplistic view holds that 20th-century Russian ballet eschewed modernist abstraction and maintained its link with narrative exclusively because of Socialist Realism. It would be more accurate, however, to consider that the narrow doctrine of Socialist Realism, when applied to dance, dovetailed with the broader, pre-existing esthetic of Russian dramatic dance.

Mr. Eifman's works offer yet another reminder that in its infancy the Russian school had close ties with the progressive European genre known as the ballet d'action. ''I think that the type of philosophical theater that I am working to create was not born in the Soviet Union,'' he said. In a reference to the 18th-century father of the ballet d'action, he added, ''That's an idea that belongs to Noverre.''

''Personally, I think there is no abstract ballet,'' Mr. Eifman said, echoing the views of countless Russian artists, including the emigre Balanchine. Through his work Mr. Eifman proves that the Romantic esthetic remains alive and well in 1998 St. Petersburg. His ballets represent a further development of Russia's own theatrical tradition, a hardy offshoot of European ballet that not only predates but also has survived Communism and has not ceased to bear fruit.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 5, 1998, on Page 2002014 of the National edition with the headline: DANCE; A Traditionalist Who Seeks To Update the Russian Soul. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe